Maria Eleftheriou and Sana Sayed Abstract The American University of Sharjah (AUS) Writing Center, one of the first writing centers in the Gulf region, supports a multilingual student body in the transnational context of the United Arab Emirates. The profile gives an account of the Center’s history, peer-tutoring program, tutor-training course, and Writing Fellows initiative, […]

From an unsettled, ambivalent middle between discourses of generative AI integration and refusal, we offer a critical-ethical stance for AI-engaged writing assignments. We apply a critical thinking framework to these assignments, assert critical AI literacy as a kind of critical thinking, and discuss how critical thinking and critical AI literacy can facilitate ethical discernment about generative AI use. This unsettled, critical-ethical stance positions scholars in our field to support context-sensitive pedagogical responses to generative AI across first-year writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing centers, and beyond.

In gaming, cheat codes change how players engage a system by inviting exploration and reducing the fear of failure. Drawing on writing center pedagogy, this article proposes a similar framework for navigating generative AI in writing instruction and positions play as a method for developing critical AI literacy. Writing centers have long served as spaces where students engage collaboratively with new technologies and construct meaning through dialogue. This article extends that tradition by positioning writing center pedagogy as a framework for helping students examine AI’s ethical implications through treating it as a rhetorical situation to be unpacked, which demands principled, human-centered engagement rooted in values such as collaborative exploration. By weaving together writing center praxis and game-informed pedagogy, this article contributes to ongoing conversations in writing studies about how to integrate AI in ways that support critical thinking and ethical reflection. It demonstrates how playful, classroom-tested activities can animate discussions of bias and representation while helping students build rhetorical discernment through experience. Ultimately, the article argues that ethical literacy must be practiced through relational, iterative work. As writing classrooms become one of the few remaining spaces where students encounter generative AI with support and critical context, writing instructors have a vital opportunity to help students learn to write with, against, and around powerful technologies.

Kristina Quynn Abstract CSU Writes supports researchers as writers across their career span at Colorado State University. The program emerged in an already rich writing ecosystem that includes a Writing Center and the WAC Clearinghouse. Since 2015, CSU Writes has helped thousands of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students write more regularly, skillfully, and with […]

The article explores the prevalence of for-profit tutoring services contracted by four-year and two-year colleges and the perceptions writing center professionals have about for-profit tutoring services. Applying a grounded theory approach, the researchers found five main themes that emerged from an open-ended survey sent to writing studies and writing center listservs in fall 2022. The article concludes with suggestions modeled after not-for-profit tutoring initiatives such as the Western eTutoring Consortium.

As part of a study I conducted to investigate the variables that influence our students’ writing center participation, students who had not used the center were asked to submit free-response data to further describe their reasons for nonuse. For this article, the nonusers’ narrative data are interpreted within the context of the quantitative results I obtained to gain a deeper understanding of why some students do not use our writing center. Based on my findings, I offer recommendations for tailoring writing center support to better meet our students’ needs, with the overall aim of increasing their use of our services.

Answering recent calls for more scholarship on LGBTQIA+ experiences in the writing center, this article reflects upon the joys and emotional labor involved in queering our center’s programming by offering an LGBTQIA+ literature writing group.

This collaboratively composed paper recognizes the juxtaposition and resonance between two writing center workers’ experiences, writerly voices, and perspectives on the future of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the two-year writing center. It also takes into account our shared commitment to honesty with ourselves and each other about where we succeed and where we fail in our work as diversity practitioners.

This article examines two-year college peer writing tutors’ preparedness for the emotional labor of writing center work. Through stories, this multivocal piece shares the experiences of nine current and former peer tutors from a writing center at a large midwestern technical college and challenges the narrative of two-year colleges as remedial spaces.

In recent years, the college writing center at our community college began an embedded tutoring program in hopes of reaching more developmental English students. A combination of the pandemic and the temporary shift to online-only tutoring, pandemic funding opportunities, and changes in the college’s developmental education program led tutors to rethink how best to help developmental students succeed. Ultimately, this article shows that developing our embedded tutoring program facilitated a partnership between instructors, tutors, and students that resulted in higher academic performance, student and faculty engagement, and faculty buy-in.

The editors of this special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College highlight the lack of scholarship on two-year college writing centers despite their widespread presence. Systemic barriers are in place at most two-year colleges, including heavy workloads, lack of institutional support for research, and limited incentives for two-year-college writing center staff to publish. The issue features new research showcasing the unique challenges and innovations in two-year college writing centers. The editors hope this issue sparks an ongoing conversation around the important and distinctive work happening in two-year college writing centers